Sunday, March 13, 2011

It is all about information

While I've been reading Art DeVany for years, I think that I have only just started to "get it" in some ways. His book has helped - I thought initially that it was too dumbed down but there is some real wisdom in there.

Doug McGuff has also been important especially the talk from the 21 Convention that has been made available from Anthony. I've posted it below. This talk is vital stuff. Take the time to watch it and think the implications through.

Anyway, I've been thinking back to my university courses in Economics. One of the key things that they tried to teach us in microeconomics was the idea that PRICES ARE SIGNALS. It is all abotu information. The market reacts to signals and prices are one of those signals. It is all about information and the signals that are being received.

This is something that comes through very much in Art DeVany and Doug McGuff. Your body reacts to signals. Everything you do provides information to your body:

how you move

how you eat

how you sleep

It is all about signals, information being given to which your body reacts, adapts.

What signals are you sending by how you eat or move? It isn't a workout...it is information you are providing, a signal to which your body will respond.

7 comments:

That idea of 'signalling and information' is very much consistent with my interpretation of ADVs work. Your link to Taleb's Fooled by Randomness contained this quote that really hit home with me:

"Classical thermodynamics produce Gaussian variations, while informational variations are from Extremistan. Let me explain. If youconsider your diet and exercise as a simple energy deficits and excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links.Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new BMW. If on the other hand you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workoutprovide your body with information about stressor in the environment.As I have been saying throughout, informational randomness is fromExtremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simplethermodynamics, with the same physics-envy and with the samementality and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. And both are complex systems."

I like the fact that the paleo concept is evolving and becoming more 'evolution focused' rather than paleo navel-gazing. We are seeing change; carbohydrate is being reformed and dairy has a place in this brave new world. The same might even be happening with the 'paleo view' of exercise.

But the whole signalling/information paradigm championed above seems to be quite fertile ground and yet is largely ignored by the more scientifically inlined in the paleo crowd. In an adaptive biological system, you'd think that this would be THE crucial approach.

I think signals is a great way of viewing the body. Aside from external signaling (lifting a heavy weight) there's also internal signaling. For example, the fat cells signaling the brain with leptin. If that signal breaks down then the system (us) starts to break down.